Robert Putnam
speaker
197 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Robert Putnam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
When social media first came out, everybody thought it was you know, unbelievably great. World peace was going to break out. We would all have, and we would all be friends with each other because we were all connecting across. That always at that time seemed a little strange to me, but the academic work about that's true was always fascinating.
more skeptical than the people who are making money by getting us onto their websites. Yeah, of course. But the real question at that point, if I can put it this way, was, is Facebook better or worse than bowling leagues? I'm using that as a synonym, I mean, just as labels for those two things.
And then he at one point said, well, OK, maybe Putnam is right, but we're going to create a new kind of Facebook that's going to be even super dandier. And it's going to be wonderful, even better than bowling leagues. But the academic research, I repeat, was always skeptical about that. But then came a terrible natural experiment, COVID. But now I promised you I was going to get more complicated.
But I can tell that Christiane likes to deal with complications, so I'm going to... I have so far been phrasing this problem as if the choice we had was between either face-to-face or social media, right? Yes. But actually, that's not true. Almost all of our networks today are simultaneously face-to-face and internet-based.
My wife, Rosemary... and I do see each other a lot every day. That is, there is a face-to-face relationship there, but she has a different office than mine. And astonishingly, much of the time I sent her an email or sent her a text and she responds, it's not, we have one set of relationships that are face-to-face and a different set of relationships that are internet-based. They're the same.
And I want to use a metaphor here, if I can. In chemistry, we have the idea of an alloy is a mixture of two different base chemicals. like tin and copper, and you stir it and heat it and so on, and you get something that is neither tin or copper, but I never can remember, bronze or brass or something like that. Right. And brass is different from either the tin or the copper. Okay, so far so good?
Now what I'm saying is all of our networks today are alloys. So the question really is... How can we get an alloy that has the benefits of both? That is to say, could we find a way to create a network that has the advantages that the internet has of not depending upon space, but that has the advantages of face-to-faceness, namely you can actually get together and cooperate with somebody.
Do we know how to do that? And the answer is we sure do. We know how to, for example, there are networks that are that are internet-based for neighborhoods. And it's easy to contact the other people. Just whenever you get the idea, you want to borrow a rake or something, you just send out an email. But then they're also in the neighborhood. So I could go and get the- You go get the rake in person.
So it's not a technical problem. So why don't we have lots of these things? It sounds like we're wonderful to have this, right? And it turns out the real answer is these big companies. They know how to do it. They know, and I know this because I've talked personally, they invited me, Bob Putnam, out to wherever it was in Silicon Valley to talk about social capital. Amazing.
And we had a wonderful conversation. They clearly knew what I meant, and they knew the difference between face-to-face and connected, and they knew how to use, they conveyed the idea that they knew how to... Oh, they knew how to use their tools to get people to connect in person. Yes, but why don't they do that? Answer...
When it's much better for their business line if people fight than if they cooperate.
Yeah. And there's wonderful data on that. If you were worried about crime in your neighborhood and you had one of two strategies, you could have a lot more cops on the beat, pay cops more and, you know, arm them and so on. Or you could know one another's first name. The second is the more important crime-fighting strategy.
That is, it's more effective to have eyes on the street from your neighbors, just as you're saying. And what I'm talking about is big, huge studies that have done this experimentally.
Yeah, well, I'm sorry.
Yeah, well, at any rate, I don't want to interrupt this conversation Except that I hope we have a chance to go back to Bowling Alone and explain and say why it explains Trump.
Right. Remember, bowling alone said 25 years ago that we had been for 25 years. At that point, had been... It'd been 25 years we've been going downhill in terms of our social connections. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's right. And that had been happening for 25 years. Now, 25 years later, we've gone back and done the same study, and it turns out nothing has changed. It's still going downhill. Despite all of my pleading and talking with people, it's going downhill, which now means for 50 years we've been going downhill. Wow. Donald Trump did not cause that. And this is the main thing I want to say here.
Donald Trump is not the cause of our problems. He's the symptom of our problems. American democracy had these problems long before Trump appeared on the scene. And most importantly, we will have those same problems leading to faltering democracy when he's no longer on the scene. Donald Trump exploited this. And I mean that, so this is Bob Putnam saying, you know, Donald Trump,
exploited what I had discovered. That's not just me. Steve Bannon has said, I could show you the quote. Well, we were trying to figure out how we could get Donald Trump elected. And then we read this book by this crazy guy, Putnam, about bowling alone.
Yeah. He's quoting, you can find, I mean, later on.
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